As things happen when one lives in a place as long as I have (basically the same city all of my life) one tends to see the same faces, hear stories of the same people and be able to share in the “Yeah-that-used-to-be-a-bar-now-it’s-a-convenience-store” pining with folks of the same age. Tonight, I was headed to a kink party. The guy who owned the studio I was driving to had been in a band that my band had played with too many years before. For the past decade he’s been a highly regarded photographer and magazine editor for titles like Gent, Busty Beauties, D-Cup and Cleavage. He rents out his big studio for live cam shoots and kink parties a couple times a month.
As the Saturday night traffic raced to the local mall/puberty-plex movie theater, I took an exit onto a one-lane road through a town I had driven through my entire life and arrived at the kink party just about as it began. For sure, not all private play spaces are outfitted as well as Anton’s studio is. I’ve been in a couple, some in big bad NYC city-rather small, weirdly tiled places, a sprawling ex military building that I’ve been to twice on the West Coast, and my share of private parties. Every space is informed as much by where it is as by the guy who runs it. “There really is no place like this in the northern New Jersey area,” Anton told me, “and anything you can think of has most likely happened here.”
Standing there amid the big rooms sporting winches, cages, beds, stocks and racks, I had to agree that not only were the five-or-so high-ceilinged rooms outfitted well, but having such a space literally right in my back yard made it extra special to me.
“Originally, when the fetish industry was huge, this studio was Mistress Rhiannon’s dungeon,” Anton explains. “The dungeon metamorphosized into a porn studio. We actually started hosting ‘content’ parties years ago, running from Friday night until Monday morning, everything is web-cammed live on the Internet and captured on tape. We gathered porn stars, escorts, strippers, swingers and anybody else who wants to perform sexually or in a fetish environment. From there, I simply began opening my studio/dungeon to the local fetish community a couple times a month for these parties.”
Almost everyone paying the nominal fee to get in was coupled. Kinksters, or at least the ones I met this night, while not always monogamous—in the strictest sense of the word—at least enter and leave a social event like this pretty much together. The chances of a single guy or girl attending is rare.
As we milled about, hugs, handshakes and smiles were exchanged and coats were hung with women running off the bathroom to take off even more clothes, I realized the crowd was mature and quite sedate. I mentioned my observations to the host.
“My core group is older and very experienced, but sedate?” Anton said, chuckling. “I’d never call these folks sedate.’ These people know what they like and heartily indulge in those activities with passion and intensity.”
But I was wondering, as I walked amongst some bare-assed floggings, a few women stuck in stocks, a foot massage or two, a pretty interesting violet wand demonstration (unfortunately with the woman clothed, still it was hot) and all that PVC and leather what, if anything, Anton wouldn’t let happen in here.
“Anything that is really forced, as opposed to role-play, and blood-play,” he said. “My dungeon monitor and I discussed blood-play, but we decided that we wouldn’t know where to draw the line, so we decided to just rule it out. And of course, no photography of any kind. These people are very private and want to keep it that way.”
In addition to hosting parties, Anton continues his work as a world-renowned fetish photographer, but as all of us know—and you, dear readers, more than most since you’re consuming this tale online—print media is in a state of flux at the moment. As it’s anybody’s guess where the even the New York Times will be in a year, let alone fetish mags, Anton is branching out.
“A month ago I launched my new project, FuryCash.com,” he tells me as we stood in his office and he brought-up his various websites on his PC screens. “This first wave features a group of websites catering to the fetish/niche market: CultofdeSade.com, CleavageKittens.com, ExtremeXXXTits.com, FunWithFatChicks.com, MilfinMagic.com, EuroTrashSluts.com, FuryPix.com, MistressRhiannon.com and RhiannonXXX.com. This studio is utilized to shoot video content for all the sites.”
It was almost one o’clock when I made my exit, after watching a man with his hands tied up over his head get flogged expertly, then have his prostate massaged, with the massager wearing the requisite rubber gloves and having placed a pad under him. Anton reports it takes him all of 15 minutes to clean-up—that’s how hygienic these kinksters are!
“The beauty of the fetish community is that they police themselves,” Anton said as we bid one another good night. “Fetish is about fetish... that in itself is the party.”
Late night in suburban Jersey is a awash of drive-thru Dunkin Donuts and a few highway side clubs way too crowded and bustling with young people who’d never even dream about how much naked skin and sexual fun I had just witnessed. Who says youth is wasted on the young?